Scott Koblish

Turns out I was sick!

That feeling of being run down on Thursday night? - Turns out I was sick. Within two hours of posting on Thursday, I was on the bed - as Violet would say "all shivvery" and sweating away a pretty intense flu. I'm better now - a combination of Veracid, Colloidal Silver, something else I'm forgetting right now, and good old fashioned sweat kicked it out in about 48 hours. Good old Katie knew just what to do to kill it (especially since she had the exact same thing a week before!)

whew - so now that there's only one more page of the Weapon left, I just suggested to the editor a 23rd page to issue 4.

I think either that it might be a nice capstone to the book, or it might be be incredibly indulgent, or a sign that I'm having a little difficulty mentally letting go of a book I've worked on it for so long now, but I can't tell. That's what editors are for, so I tossed it into play with a little sketch. We'll see when the week begins.

Until then - here's the latest page uploaded to Drunk Duck-



I remember adding 2 things to the page as it was - one was a compass in Megan's hand, because I wasn't sure how else they'd know which way to point the sword to get the proper reflection, and two a little dragon figure to the left of Tommy while he assumes "Wu-Shu Position Number 5."

I had to combine 25 pages down to 22 for the second issue and it was in this page that I combined nearly 2 full pages of information into one. I had already done the layouts for the pages before I started to combine them, and came to a bit of a problem with Tommy's placement when he was doing his "Wu-Shu" The figure fell in the middle of the page now, instead of the top of the page and his pose called for a verticle panel, but all I could eak out of the new layout was a square, so i made him smaller and verticle, and added 2 horizontal panels accross his head and feet to connect him back to the rest of the page, but that gained me a huge empty space to his left. I can't let negative space lie (a variant on letting sleeping dogs lie), so I filled it up with a decorative dragon. I thought it was so jarring in the finished ink work, but I had to move on and I left it in there. In the printed color version, you hardly notice it as jarring. I wonder if it's all the text exposition that makes it work, or if the colorwork made it seem completely expected. I don't know - it's the first fanciful element of design that I threw in there without any purpose and I tought it would be a little more of a problem than it turned out to be.

posted by Scott Koblish @ 10:24 PM